2002 Volume 111 Issue 3 Pages 374-394
The detection rate of eruption cloud with Geostationary Meteorological Satellite (GMS ; HIMAWARI in Japanese) is 12.1%, but GMS can detect and track, at a high rate of 81.5%, eruption cloud from a large explosive eruption higher than 10 km which may threaten aviation safety.
Estimates of the top altitude of eruption clouds within the tropopause based on cloud-top temperature show fairly high values compared to those obtained by ground observations. Growth of vapor clouds over eruption clouds induced by strong ascending currents with eruption-onset may be the reason.
Apparent dislocation of eruption clouds on GMS images due to the parallax of GMS is clarified for the case of the 1986 Izu-Oshima Eruption, Japan, and the underestimation of cloud-top is possibly due to warming of the cloud-surface by radiation from internal hot material.
From inspections of the pattern of cloud-extent, type, strength, decay, and duration of eruption activity can be evaluated.
Differential Thermal Infrared Imagery of GMS-5 is very effective for discriminating ashbearing cloud from ambient atmospheric cloud, but cannot clearly separate an eruption cloud with an extremely high content of water-vapor with phreatic/phreatomagmatic eruption.
